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crissindahouse on 27 January 2012
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rocketpig said:
crissindahouse said:
rocketpig said:

A big difference is choice. You have options in the PC world and you're not locked into one method of DD. The publisher may choose to use only one service but after a time, there will be various DD vendors competing for your dollar. Consoles are a different matter entirely. With consoles, you're locked into one ecosystem. If everything moved to DD, that would be very constraining on the consuer, though DD will naturally continue to gain ground in the console arena because of convenience.

Another thing to note is that consoles are group devices while PCs are very solitary. Rarely will a person take a PC game to a friend's house just to sit and take the time to install so they can watch their friend play a game. Inversely, how many times have you taken a console disc game over to a friend's to give the game a whirl in multiplayer? They're very different entities with very different uses. PCs are also dominated by MMOs. Why on earth would you need a disc for an MMO? It's entirely pointless.

Also, I really question those numbers you posted. It puts the US PC market at $400 million in 2009. Yet in December of 2009, Blizzard reported 11.5 million subscribers for WoW. In one month, those 11.5 mllion people would have paid somewhere around $115 million to Blizzard in the month of December alone and that's only counting subscription fees. I found a Kotaku article from June of 2009 that states the US had purchased 8.6 million copies of the game so at worst, half of WoW's subscribers are American. And we're only talking about one game here. Blizzard must get at least $500m from the US every year for that one game, probably much more. By using numbers that exclude DD and therefore MMOs (a huge section of American PC gaming), the numbers are so skewed as to be nearly useless. It's akin to saying Japan has a stronger RPG market than America because you looked at the latest sales of Final Fantasy.

euro not dollar. it was a german site putting all numbers to euro and i said without dd so subscriptions aren't in these numbers. no clue why you talk now about these numbers because we talk about copies you can buy and not a subscription...i don't talk about xbox live or so lol?

i really don't care about all of that i just replied t the guy who said pc games aren't presesnt in retail anymore and that's not true in europe that's all i was saying. in germany the shops have bigger pc game shelves than console shelves...

Euro, dollar, whatever. There's only a ~25% shift in there either way. The number is still WAY too low.

Sigh. That's why I said the numbers are essentially useless. What good are PC gaming numbers when you don't include DD or MMO subscriptions when a country like the US spends such a large percentage of its PC gaming money through those two things? Like I said, "It's akin to saying Japan has a stronger RPG market than America because you looked at the latest sales of Final Fantasy."

I take it back. Those numbers aren't almost useless, they're worse than useless because they portray such a misguided look at the market

i was talking about pc games in shops and our shops here have more pc games than console games. i don't fking care about how many americans download their games because we europeans download them as well...and still we buy as many pc games at retail shops as the americans do and they have a population 4 times bigger. i have absolutely no clue why you don't undertsand it it's a well known fact that in europe pc gaming is much bigger compared to usa in comparison to console gaming.

i give you numbers showing how many euros the retail made in germany and usa with pc games (almost the same)  because the guy said shops don't have pc games anymore and i said it depends where you live so what's exactly your problem?

do you think only you download pc stuff and we not? "the numbers are uselees because americans downlaod so much" yeah sure you downlaod everything and we don't...but what i said i don't care i was talking about retailers and their shelves full of pc games.

you just should walk through a retailer here to see what i'm talking about. there are even shelves only for tractor simulations and shit like that bigger than the whole 360 shelve lol

btw all numbers are from 2009 so, in 2009, digital downloads were the same in usa as retail numbers. that's what npd said so you can double the 400 million to 800 million (ok downloads were less expensive so not 400 million) against german 400 million + x digital downloads. so even if we wouldn't have bought any game online we still would have double the ratio than you in america per capita but we downlaod as well so i think it's still 4x as much.

"The NPD Group, in 2009, 21.3 million PC Game full-game digital downloads were purchased online in the U.S. compared to 23.5 million physical units purchased at retail during the same period.

While NPD’s point-of-sale research shows that PC physical retail sales experienced a year-over-year revenue decline in 2009, it was still slightly larger than PC digital download sales on a unit basis.  PC digital downloads represented close to half of unit sales across digital and retail at 48 percent in 2009, and accounted for 36 percent of dollar sales."